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seventh period. Zimmerman made a notation and winked over at the Osgood girl, who didn’t know what was up. Dumb. Dumb as pure white lead.
    “A thousand thousand
thousand
,” Caldwell announced. “A thousand million. That’s a billion. There are over two billion people in the world right now,” he said, “and it all began around a million years ago when some dumb ape swung down out of a tree and looked around and wondered what he was doing here.” The class laughed, and Deifendorf, one of the country boys who came in on the bus, began to scratch his scalp and armpit and make monkey chatter. Caldwell tried to overlook it because the boy was his ace swimmer. “Another place you hear billions is in the national debt,” he said. “We owe ourselves about two hundred sixty billion bucks rightnow. It cost us about three hundred fifty billion to kill Hitler. Another place is with the stars. There are about a hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, which is called—what?”
    “The solar system?” Judy offered.
    “The Milky Way,” Caldwell said. “The solar system has just one star in it—what’s it called?”
    He pointedly looked toward the rear of the class but in the corner of his eye Judy said “Venus?” anyway. The boys laughed at this; Venus, venereal, V. D. Someone clapped.
    “Venus is the brightest planet,” Caldwell explained to her. “We call it a star because it looks like one. But of course the only real star we’re at all close to is—”
    “The Sun,” somebody in the class said, and Caldwell never knew who it was, because he was concentrating on Judith Lengel’s dull strained face and trying to tell her without words that she mustn’t let her old man get her down. Relax, girl, you’ll get a mate. You’ll get a date and then a mate. And then you’ll rate. (It would make a good Valentine—every once in a while Caldwell got an inspiration like this.)
    “Right,” he said to the class, “the Sun. Now here’s a figure.” He wrote on the blackboard 6,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000. “How would you say it?” He answered himself, “Six,” and, looping back the trios of zeros, “thousand, million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion,
sex
tillion. Six sextillion. What does it represent?” Mute faces marvelled and mocked. Again he answered himself. “The weight of the earth in tons. Now the sun,” he said, “weighs this much more.” He wrote 333,000 on the blackboard, saying, half to the class, half to the slate, “Three-three-three oh-oh-oh. Multiply it out, and you get”—
skrkk, scrak
, the chalk chipped as he carried the ones—“one nine nine eight followed by twenty-four goose eggs.” He stepped back and looked; his work sickened him.
    1,​998,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000
    The zeros stared back, every one a wound leaking the word “poison.” “That’s the weight of the Sun,” Caldwell said. “Who cares?”
    Laughter bobbled about him. Where was he? “Some stars are bigger,” he said, stalling, “some are smaller. The next nearest star is Alpha Centauri, four light-years away. Light goes one-eight-six oh-oh-oh miles a second.” He wrote it on the blackboard. There was little space left. “That’s six trillion miles a year.” With his fingertips he erased the 5 in the age of the universe and put in a 6. “Alpha Centauri is twenty-four trillion miles away.” The pressure in Caldwell’s stomach released a bubble and he bit back a belch. “The Milky Way, which used to be thought of as the path by which the souls of the dead travelled to Heaven, is an optical illusion; you could never reach it. Like fog, it would always thin out around you. It’s a mist of stars we make by looking the long way through the galaxy; the galaxy is a spinning discus a hundred thousand light-years wide. I don’t know who threw it. Its center is in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius; that means ‘archer,’ like